


Ritualized Combat

by zvi



Category: Merry Gentry series by Laurel K. Hamilton
Genre: Gen, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-25
Updated: 2005-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 01:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zvi/pseuds/zvi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merry runs from her guard, but she's not afraid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ritualized Combat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/gifts).



The woman rode on the back of a bird, much like an eagle, but with pure black plumage and an enormous size. Her hair, red like rubies glazed in black, streamed out behind her.

A man stood on the ground below. His skin was white, like freshly fallen snow. He wore a silver vest and white pants tied loosely at his waist. His hair was silver and his loose pony tail looked as if it had been beaten out by some fanciful smith. His arms were out from his sides, perpendicular to his body, and his hands extended, fingers stretched to their farthest reach.

He was motionless, a finely crafted snowman, except for the weird, wild hair. The wind picked up and his hair rippled quietly, an effect like moonstruck water.

The eagle climbed higher. The woman on its back leaned forward. She rested her head in the space between its wings.

The man on the ground began to turn, a slow, mesmerizing twist at first, but the motion built, the spin accelerating until he was a white blur in the middle of the white valley, already lightly dusted with snow. He had spun for a time more than short and less than long when the snow began to rise, upward and outward from the twister of his body. He spun so fast no human eye could follow him and threw so much snow it would have hidden him had one been capable.

The eagle continued to circle the valley, climbing higher and higher, searching for the drafts that died as the temperature cooled and steadied and leached the motion from the air. Then the woman's grip loosened, her fingers slackened, and the eagle drifted down to the top of a mound, then farther, to the side, then the rest of the way down, to the valley's floor.

As it drifted, slowly, heavily, the woman's head came up and she gasped the air, cold as it was. The snow landed on them, turning the eagle from black to white, hiding the woman's hair in a momentary veil. The bird landed and the woman rolled off.

A black cloud flashed up around the bird. When it flashed away, a dog the size of a pony stood where it had been. The woman approached the dog, and it growled at her. She stopped, shivering and muttering. The dog dug, quickly and carefully, with paws the size of a large man's hands, until it had dug a hollow in the snow where the grass glittered through, green and icy.

The woman came forward again, removed her cloak, a soft and many-colored fur, and placed it on the grass. She sat herself upon the cloak, then lay down, curled into a ball. The dog covered the hole with its body, leaving just space for her to breathe, and faced the spinning, whirling man in the center of the valley.

The snow stopped. The man stopped his spin. He brought his hands down to his side and smiled. He walked to the dog, then slowly walked a circle around it. When he reached the tail, he raised his hand, shook it sharply, and threw an ice ball. The ice came from his fingers as he threw, a jagged, solid lump, sharp and strange and not in the least bit round.

The dog ignored the first ball and the second. Its hindquarters twitched at the impact of the third, and it successfully batted away the fourth and fifth, one with tail and one with paw. The woman made the tiniest moan as the cold air rushed in, and the dog hunched back over her.

The man moved to the dog's side for his next missile launch. The ice hit the dog so hard one could hear the ricochet off the ribs. The dog whined and the man laughed and began to run. He circled the dog and pelted it with ice balls and large hail pieces and tiny, digging pellets. It was a very focused, very painful winter storm.

The dog growled low in its throat.

The man ran in his circle and threw ice at the dog.

The dog barked.

The man ran and threw.

The dog howled like a hellhound and gave chase.

The man ran away and then stopped running. He didn't stop moving, but he no longer moved as a man did; instead he floated, skittered, twisted with the wind, more in the air than for leaping or dancing, but still too much on the ground to be called flying. It looked much as if a snowflake had grown legs to race the wind.

The dog could not match the speed of this locomotion, so it fell further and further behind the man. When they were separated by perhaps half the length of the valley, the black cloud returned around the dog. Between one step and another the dog was gone and in its place a horse, still black as night, but thirty-five hands at the shoulder if it was a foot.

The horse closed steadily on the man, black hooves kicking up a spray of wet snow somehow faster than his joyous tumble which left no depression in its wake, but instead, raised footprints of the icy crust that forms when wet snow freezes. The man could not gain enough speed to escape the horse, and when it was practically upon him, no more than twenty yards away, he stopped, all motion halted as if he truly were the icesculpture he resembled.

And the horse saw its mistake, for the man stood over the woman, feet just outside the boundaries of fur and grass. The man threw his arms wide once more, but this time, instead of snow or hail, the man made iceswords, sharp, jagged blades of frozen water on all sides of him, like a sea anemone's spines.

The horse slowed down, but still came closer, now ten yards, now five. The ice grew out, met the horse, slashed its foreleg.

The horse sunfished, and the cloud covered it again. Its forelegs did not come down, for the cloud dissipated to reveal a man, skin just as black as the eagle's feather or the horse's hair. He held his arm where bright red blood dripped out from it. "I concede, Frost," he said. "Let Merry go, she shouldn't get too chilled."

The man in the ice cage said, "And who was it that flew her so high she couldn't breathe? I have to send the heat somewhere when I make this cold; I have wrapped her in it." But the iceblades crashed to the ground with a crack like gunshot.

Meredith, Queen of Flesh and Blood, crawled out from between her guardsman's legs with a big smile on her face and the tri-colored rings of her eyes whirling like mad. She turned to face him and put her hands up, and when Frost lifted her, she kissed him thoroughly.

Doyle walked up beside them, and she turned and kissed him, too.

"Thank you, thank you both. I know this is not what most Sidhe do to celebrate the season, but how on Earth or Underhill can it be Yuletide if you don't play in the snow?"


End file.
